Structure

John Prine says….

I’m going to lead off with yesterday’s Bonus Round, because the song in the answer will feature in today’s post:

The clue is always in the subtitle!

Dusty Springfield covered “The Windmills Of Your Mind”, a song (not by her) originally introduced in the film “The Thomas Crown Affair” (she hated it, though it was her biggest solo recording). It was a French musical composition by a fellow named Michel Legrand with subsequent English lyrics (written by some other writers) for the movie and sung during the glider flying scene by a guy named Noel Harrison.

The subsequent remake of The Thomas Crown Affair with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo playing the Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway parts (Faye Dunaway had a supporting role in the remake) featured a cover of “Windmills” by Sting.

Let’s jump ahead for a minute and talk about what a “cover” is. A cover is a song performed and recorded by someone other than the owner of the rights to the song. Songwriters often don’t own all, sometimes even any, rights to the song they wrote, either because they sold the rights, or they were hired to write for a specific fee, but without ownership rights. The Dusty Springfield version made money for her, but some of the royalty money went to whoever held the rights to the song, and there are a number of different royalty streams that arise from owning those rights (with the rise of internet streaming, the number of different royalty streams has risen dramatically since the 60s!). We’re going to talk a lot more about copyright and how brutal the music industry can be for performers and songwriters as we move along. The lesson I want to leave you with today is ALWAYS copyright your songs with the US copyright office. It’s easy online, you can copyright a batch (up to ten) songs at a time for a greatly reduced rate over the fee for copyrighting each song singly. You’ll save a bunch in lawyer’s fees if ownership of rights to your song is ever contested, and you’ll win!

I chose yesterday’s song “Windmills of Your Mind” to illustrate the topic of song structure. Right now you may only be playing songs you find on the Ultimate Guitar or Chordify apps, maybe recording a bit on the Acapella app with the community there. All of that is a perfectly lawful “cover” of someone else’s song (because it’s considered a royalty free educational purpose) so long as you don’t sell or profit in any way from your performance or recording. That said, you’ll probably have noticed a common pattern to most blues based songs. Something like Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Verse, Chorus. Probably there’s an instrumental intro and outro at the beginning and end, and maybe an instrumental break between the Verse-Chorus combinations and possibly on either (or both sides) of the bridge. Very standard, millions of songs written in just this structure, and we’re very accustomed to hearing that pattern, or some variation of it. To break out of that pattern is a way to make music more interesting, though perhaps not more commercially successful - a LOT of variables go into commercial success! One variable is creating new forms of “breaking the pattern”and creating interest in the unique. Right now, rap, hip-hop, Electronic Dance Music (EDM) is the big kid on the block, in part because beat based, rather than pattern based, music is capturing the interest of a wide swath of listeners. Blues based music is still very popular in all its forms - country, rock, pop, Americana, Christian music (which is mostly pop/country/rock/folk based), and still making money for writers, producers and performers. No matter what style or genre, interesting music will always be around!

So how does a songwriter break out of formulaic patterns? By breaking the pattern, breaking the “rules”!! A lot of blues based music now forgoes the 3rd verse/chorus pattern by repeating the chorus, even with a chorus/bridge/chorus pattern (yes, church music directors, I’m looking at you!).

“Windmills of Your Mind” broke a lot of the “rules” of popular music, way back in the 1960s, and was interesting because of it. There are 3 verses, no choruses at all (!!)l, and something called a conclusion at the end (you can see the lyrics on the Genius Lyric app). Dusty Springfield broke the rules of the song itself by dramatically slowing the verses from the original, and “building” the instrumentals underpinning her vocals all through the song, to a very heavily instrumental ending. It worked because her voice could carry the first verse or so nearly acapella, and the slower tempo emphasized that. She hated the song itself because she couldn’t relate to the lyrics, and she had a point - they’re almost all metaphorical, alluding to a pensive state of mind, probably - but that was intentional, because they were written for the purpose of creating a mood supporting a film sequence where the character of Thomas Crown was pondering things as he flew a glider. Nonetheless the song holds our interest because it’s all one long metaphor, and musically very cool (check the chord chart on Ultimate Guitar - it practically uses ALL of them!!). There are repeated lines, but no chorus or bridge to disrupt the story flow, however incomprehensible.

So what does this mean for songwriting? Structure is to song as chord progressions are to melodies - bones to flesh. Structure creates the bones, but lyrics, meter, rhyme patterns, rhythm and tempo, storyline, and the musical harmonies and melodies become the flesh. If the whole of the song is interesting in all of its parts, bones and flesh, it speaks to us as more than its parts.

A note on structure and its relationship to the whole of the song: Remember I said there were some repeated lines in “Windmills”, despite its lack of chorus and bridge? The most memorable of those lines:

“Like the circles that you find

In the windmills of your mind”

are repeated several times. Lyrics like that are called “the hook” - the part that sticks with you. As here, “the hook” is usually, but not always, the title of the song, or part of it. Some songs repeat the hook constantly, following the idea that the listener needs to hear the hook every 7 seconds during the song to make it catchy enough to stand out. There is some logic behind that notion, simply because there are so many songs flooding into the market right now. I’m more inclined to believe that while an interesting song, made interesting by the “interesting flesh and bones” concept, will always stand out, a great hook will lead listeners to investigate and listen to interesting songs in their entirety - no small feat in today’s crowded music market!!

Bonus Round: John Prine’s sorta classically structured song about Pluto’s exclusion from the list of planets in our solar system illustrates the flesh over bones idea, mostly. Name it, and identify how it deviates from the classic structure. Then ask yourself the meaning of the 3rd verse!

Cheers, and keep playing!!

Michael Acoustic